Tom Thibodeau considers Timberwolves’ season a ‘success’

Tom Thibodeau considers the just-completed Timberwolves season to be a “success”. Is his assertion correct?

Timberwolves brass held their end-of-season press conference on Monday afternoon, featuring comments from both general manager Scott Layden and head coach and president of basketball operations Tom Thibodeau.

Much of it appeared to be fairly run-of-the-mill, but there were a couple of notable quotes to surface.

First, Thibodeau characterized the 2017-18 campaign as a “success”, and provided a fairly solid reason as to why he thinks as such.

He’s not wrong. We discussed this in a quick season wrap-up at the end of last week, when we put the season in perspective. From that article:

"At first glance, the context for the Timberwolves appears to be obvious: the team hadn’t been to the playoffs in 14 calendar years, and won only 31 games a season ago. An improvement to 47 regular season wins and a playoff berth is a success, no question about it.The counterpoint is that the Wolves added a superstar who is unquestionably one of the 10 to 12 best players in the league, and saw their second-best player named an All-Star shortly after turning 22 years old. Of course they should have improved, and squeaking into postseason play as the eighth-seed on the last day of the regular season isn’t exactly the same as turning into a true contender."

Whether a small business, a Fortune 500 company, or a sports organization, changing culture is a process. Hats off to Thibodeau and Layden for apparently doing just that in about two years.

(The conversation surrounding the quality of the current culture is open for discussion, of course. Thibodeau’s coaching and, um, methods of motivating certainly differ from his predecessors, for better or for worse. But it is undeniable that the on-court results have improved.)

A couple more interesting notes that were pulled from the presser by the Star Tribune’s Jerry Zgoda:

The idea of needing to add wings certainly isn’t new, of course, but the key is that Thibodeau plays them. Outside of Jamal Crawford, and, in the playoffs at least, Derrick Rose, backup wings simply didn’t see much run with Jimmy Butler and Andrew Wiggins leading the team in playing time at over 36 minutes per game.

Marcus Georges-Hunt had a stretch in which he appeared in 25 of 28 games, as noted by our own Cooper Langby, but fell out of the rotation down the stretch in the regular season. Nemanja Bjelica started at small forward when Butler was out, but still played the vast majority of his minutes at the four.

In terms of the draft … it would be a surprise to see the Wolves make a selection at No. 20. They still have last year’s No. 16 pick, Justin Patton, who battled injuries both early and late in his rookie season, and no members of the Wolves’ G-League team played meaningful regular season minutes, either.

Darren Wolfson of ESPN 1500 and KSTP put together some highlights of the presser for your viewing pleasure.

The idea of packaging the 20th-overall draft pick with something to improve the roster is a whole different issue, of course. The Wolves don’t exactly have a host of tradeable contracts or players they would be willing to trade, so it’ll be tough.

We’ll spend quite a bit of time in the coming weeks and months discussing the No. 20 pick and what the Timberwolves may or may not be able to garner either straight-up or with a player currently on the roster. That will likely be the most interesting potential move to consider in the near future.

Next: Should the Timberwolves consider trading Jimmy Butler?

In the meantime, enjoy round two of the NBA playoffs and keep it tuned to DWW!